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Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (British History)
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Hatty
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Another just as unlikely queenly dedication just caught my eye. A unique 'girdle book', or portable prayer book, donated to the British Museum by Sir Augustus Franks in 1894, is dated 1574-6 and presumed to have been presented to Elizabeth I

According to the Curator's comments

Earliest reference to this book in 1788, John Nichols, The Progresses, and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I, where it is said that this book was given by Tirwit to Elizabeth I on her confinement in the Tower, as recorded in a now lost note in the front of the book.

When he wrote this the book belonged to Rev. Mr Ashby of Barrow, Suffolk, who could trace it back in his family to 1603. The Ashby family retained it until 1791 when William Herbert, book collector, described it in The Gentleman's Magazine. It was auctioned from the Duke of Sussex's library in 1843.

The now lost note is too illusory for the BM's curator

The tradition (which goes back to 1788) that the Book belonged to Elizabeth I cannot be verified.

and they seem to have misgivings about the 'it was in our family for two hundred years' story. Family lore claimed its ownership could be traced from 1603 to 1720 when it came into the family's hands and that the queen had given the book to "one of her women of the Bedchamber" but unfortunately there are no records of such a girdle book in the royal inventories.
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Hatty
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I am grateful to Twitter for bringing to my attention a world record located at the marvellous St Catherine's monastery, Sinai

Kevin Wilbraham retweeted
The Christ Pantocrator of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai, produced around 548-565 in encaustic technique in Constantinople as a gift of the imperial court of Justinian I, is one of the oldest Roman religious icons, and also the earliest known version of the pantocrator style.

According to Wiki the Christ Pantocrator is

regarded by historians and scholars to be one of the most important and recognizable works in the study of Byzantine art as well as Eastern Orthodox Christianity

But hold up....

For a time the icon was thought to have been dated from the thirteenth century, since it had been almost completely painted over at that time, but it was concluded in 1962 that it is in fact from the mid-sixth century, although the exact date of production is still unknown.

There seems to be no known extant icon for comparison

Some scholars have suggested the icon at Sinai could have been a possible representation of the Kamouliana icon of Christ or of the famous icon of Christ of the Chalke Gate, an image which was destroyed twice during the first and second waves of Byzantine Iconoclasm—first in 726, and again in 814—and thus its connection with the Christ Pantocrator is difficult to confirm.

so why not link it to a big name, such as Justinian? He is after all the purported founder of the monastery

When Saint Catherine’s Monastery was founded by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, late in his reign, between 548 and 565, it enjoyed imperial patronage and donations from Justinian and his court, with the Christ Pantocrator icon having been one of the many possible imperial gifts. Because of this, it is generally believed to have been produced in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.

But analysing its components could be tricky because the icon is covered by a layer of wax containing coloured pigments, and the wax cover has been re-applied every so often. Something of a speciality of St Catherine's monastery, it turns out

The original encaustic surface has continually been preserved in excellent condition overall. As with many of the early icons from Sinai, the Christ Pantocrator was created by using this technique, known as encaustic—a medium using hot wax paint—that would rarely continue to be utilized in the Byzantine world after the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries.

In fact, the monastery at Sinai is the only place in the world where a substantial number of these encaustic icons, particularly those dating from as early as the sixth century, have been preserved

Well played, St Catherine's. Painted over. Re-waxed. No wonder none of the others survived the vicissitudes of age and iconoclasm.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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St Lucy appears to be a reworked version of Juno Lucina.

She is carrying around eyes....cakes.......

Juno Lucina gave eyesight to new born infants.

Vagitanus gave newborn infants the ability to cry

Fabulinus gave infants the ability to speak
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Aha that explains St Denis carrying his head.

Diana Lucina.

Thank you Emma....

Sorry. Thank you Hats!
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Mick Harper
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Have a look at this. It blows Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries outta the water



After a long, hard day of pillaging, nothing helped the Vikings of yore unwind more than kicking back with a good old-fashioned board game. Especially popular was Hnefatafl (pronounced “neffa-taffle”), a strategy game that pitted a king and his defenders against two dozen attackers. Though much about Hnefatafl remains mysterious, the pastime was clearly precious. Wherever the Scandinavian raiders went, so too did their playing pieces.

Bully for them but what's it got to do with us?

Now, researchers conducting excavations on the English island of Lindisfarne may have uncovered one of these treasures:

Oh Gawd, Forgeries advances the case that the Vikings are a figment of later imaginings and there was nothing on Dark Age Lindisfarne worth even a tourist visit from Scandinavians. Go on, give it to me straight, I can take it

a tiny glass gaming piece, stained in swirls of blue and white and capped by a delicate crown of pearly beads, that may have waged war atop a checkered Hnefatafl board more than a thousand years ago.

All this is is gleaned from an interview with our old friend and sparring partner Professor David Petts, Chief Archaeological muck-a-muck of the Holy Island. Did you spot that "delicate crown of pearly beads"? Yes, that's because there is no actual crown, no actual earthly reason to identify this as a gaming piece at all, so why not delicately convey that this is the king, no less? That is absolutely essential 'cos...
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Hatty
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Prof Petts seems to have lost one of his marbles.
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Mick Harper
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Oh, look, there it is


A Drawing made in 1939, of the glass Hnefatafl pieces found in Björkö, Norr om Borg, Grav, Kammargrav, Sweden (Bj 523). The pieces and the drawing are kept in the Historiska Museum, 106813, in Stockholm, Sweden.

They could be carbon copies.

The artifact represents a rare glimpse into the turbulent past of Lindisfarne, the site of an ancient wooden monastery

You mean every time the Hnefatafl world championships were held on Lindisfarne? When they say ‘a rare glimpse’ they really mean it. There is not a single piece of archaeological evidence for either Viking raids or an ancient monastery on Lindisfarne. But they do know it was made of wood which is something to go on.
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Mick Harper
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Bit of a mystery here. As you might have guessed from my/our air of polite scepticism we assumed it was some kind of random gewgaw. I then googled Hnefatafl pieces in order to show you what Hnefatafl pieces actually looked like. Imagine my consternation when I found it absolutely, fair and square, no messing, actually was the top bit of a king in a set of Hnefatafl pieces. So why is everyone going round speculating in the most diffident manner imaginable about what it is? Strewth, on Lindisfarne, when you find some dressed stone it's evidence of a bishop's palace and you're straight onto the BBC.

A kind of careful ignoral in reverse. We must attend carefully. Something is wrong here. Over and above the usual.
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Mick Harper
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The first oddity

The gaming piece is unusual not only as an artefact but because of the manner of its discovery

This is very significant for us. Generally speaking (no, always) we trust academic archaeological digs not to be crooked. They're crap in all kinds of other ways but not this.

DigVentures excavations are crowdfunded and staffed substantially by volunteers

Nor is this suspicious in itself, as far as I can see.

and the find was made by the mother of one of the team members, who was visiting the site for a day to celebrate her birthday

This makes me a little uneasy. The status of a 'team member' is unclear. The expression 'staffed substantially by volunteers' is equivocal. A visiting mum finding what (I can assure you) is easily the most significant find on Lindisfarne, the 'most archaeologically explored slab of ground in the world' (my words in Forgeries but ferociously disputed by Professor Petts) represents too many world records for a single sentence. 'For her birthday' just may be what we call 'overelaborate provenance syndrome'.

“Several of the most significant finds from Lindisfarne have been made by members of the public,” says DigVentures’ managing director, Lisa Westcott Wilkins. “The big argument is that you can’t do real archaeology with members of the public: you can, as long as it is properly supervised.”

This is disingenuous. I know I will be accused of pedanticism, but this is not a member of the public i.e. a random member of a large group and therefore not very significant. It was the mother of one of the chief hombres.

I am not imputing crookery. As far as I can see this is likely to be a gaming piece lost by one of the monks at the priory that was established on Lindisfarne in the twelfth century and flourished modestly there for several hundred years. It would be surprising if the monks did not play faintly intellectual board games. But it is as well to point out the pitfalls twixt cup and lip when it comes to Lindisfarne, Vikings, Celtic Christianity and Anglo-Saxons. We've been there before so many, many times.
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Hatty
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A Drawing made in 1939, of the glass Hnefatafl pieces found in Björkö, Norr om Borg, Grav, Kammargrav, Sweden

The museum allocated the pieces found in Björkö a three-hundred-year dating window

Hnefatafl Glass Pieces dated to 800 – 1099 CE

The problem seems to be the lack of recognisable sets and/or boards because it can be hard to tell them apart from other games, especially the Roman Ludus Latrunculorum

In order to date the invention of Hnefatafl one needs to find a board or a set of pieces that are unmistakably meant for the game: a square board with a marked central playing space, or an unequal set of pieces with a distinguished king piece belonging to the smaller side would be good indicators. And so far there has been no such evidence from before the eighth century.

The evidence consists of a hnefatafl set found in a ship burial at Avaldsnes, a Norwegian village on the island of Karmøy along the Karmsundet strait, which is described as "an ancient centre of power on the west coast of Norway and the site of one of Norway’s more important areas of cultural history"

Avaldsnes is believed to have been named after the legendary King Augvald, who allegedly had his seat in the area surrounding the Karmsundet strait. There had been an ancient centre of power at Avaldsnes. The shipping lane is forced into a narrow passage just by Avaldsnes. It is probably the shipping traffic on the strait which has generated power and riches through the ages. King Harald Fairhair chose Avaldsnes for his main royal estate in about 870 making it the oldest royal seat in Norway.

Harald Fairhair, according to medieval Icelandic histories of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was the first king of Norway and this king's purported estate, Avaldsnes, has another Scandinavian, possibly even a world, record -- the Storhaug ship burial

A ship burial from the time of the Merovingian Dynasty (approximately 680-750 AD) found here is the oldest ship burial uncovered within the Nordic countries

So they waited some 1,200 years before excavating Storhaug (= Great Mound)

Excavation of this burial mound started in 1886.
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Hatty
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Harald, despite being the first king of Norway, has no contemporaneous Life

Most of Harald's biography remains uncertain, since the extant accounts of his life in the sagas were set down in writing around three centuries after his lifetime.

The link between King Harald and the game of hnefatafl had hitherto only been found in later accounts of Norse mythology

The skald of Harald relates that Harald's "quick warriors" play a board game in the yard of the royal court. The Edda poem Voluspå also tells of the gods playing a board game at Idavollen.

The Voluspå (= 'Prophecy of the Seeress' in reconstructed Old Norse) is believed to have been written in the 1270s though the Codex Regius in which it's preserved was not discovered until 1643 by Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson who first named the collection of Old Norse poems 'Edda'.

There is one other source for an abridged version of the Voluspå poem. The manuscript, in a rather sorry state, was written at least six hundred years after Harald is supposed to have lived

Hauksbók ('Book of Haukr') is an Icelandic manuscript, now in three parts but originally one, dating from the 14th century. It was created by the Icelander Haukr Erlendsson. It is now fragmentary, with significant portions being lost, but is the first surviving witness to many of the texts it contains (although in most cases Haukr is known to have been copying from earlier, lost manuscripts).

The manuscript is attributed to Haukr on the usual tenuous grounds of 'handwriting style' though it's not clear what Haukr's handwriting was compared with

Palaeographical evidence allowed Professor Stefán Karlsson, director of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, to date the manuscript to between 1302 and 1310. As long back as it is possible to trace the manuscript it has been called Hauksbók after him. Hauksbók is a compilation that includes Icelandic sagas and a redaction of Landnámabók.

The book contains versions, often the only or earliest extant versions, of many Old Icelandic texts, such as Fóstbrœðra saga, Eiríks saga rauða, Hervarar saga and Völuspá. Haukr tended to rewrite the sagas that he copied, generally shortening them.

The Storhaug excavation was carried out first by a local teacher in 1886, then by an antiquarian a year later, but seems to have gone unremarked by the archaeological community because in 1998 it was one of two 'forgotten ship burials' researched by an archaeologist called Arnfrid Opedal, who went on to base her PhD thesis on burial rites and the political role of Avaldsnes, and she was responsible for dating the site to the 'Merovingian period 690-800'.
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Mick Harper
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This is all standard stuff in two respects. First, is the awarding of ancient status for what are clearly late medieval games e.g chess. The second is the claim of ancient rights for what are in fact late medieval disputes over navigational rights eg between Sweden and Denmark over the Skagerrak, the Kattegat and the Oresund. But also, and even more crucially, over who controls Norway (and more distantly, Iceland). There is nothing here that doesn't scream 'late medieval'.

But... but ... the Lindisfarne archaeologists claim, apparently in good faith, their king-piece was found in an eighth-ninth century trench. Normally we could leave one side to keep the other honest but the dominance of what might be called The Unified Paradigm Timeline -- and especially everyone's keenness on getting their share of the Viking pie -- means that it will be an uphill struggle getting anyone to cede to common sense.

Unless something turns up I don't think there's much else for us to do but jeer impotently from the sidelines.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Looks like they hit the jackpot.



This year’s investigation also uncovered two copper finger rings, a copper pin, small bronze buckle, and evidence that the workshop may have been related to metal-working, for which the monastery was famous.

Other discoveries include a set of rare early medieval carvings known as ‘namestones’, each of which commemorates someone who was buried on the island during this period.

A number of Anglo-Saxon coins were also found, including a coin minted for Aethelred I, king of Wessex from AD 865 – 871.
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Mick Harper
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I am puzzled beyond measure.
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Hatty
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Excavation of this burial mound started in 1886.

Many grave goods were found including a sledge, which can't be verified as it has since disappeared, and jewellery which seemed to confirm expectations

The king in Great Mound (Storhaug) was equipped with an arm ring of gold. Such arm rings are very rare in Viking Age graves. The Flatey Book tells that King Half also had a large ring of gold.

as well as

two sets of costly board games, one with counters made of amber and the other with counters of blue and yellow glass/ The counters were probably of the type used in the board game called Hnefatafl (Old Norse for “the king’s board”).

It may be that hnefatafl or 'king's board' was named for the 1886 find of a (presumed) king's grave. Hnefatafl isn't mentioned by name in any historical records. There are though references to tafl and games which have similar rules under another name such as chess. A Welsh game called 'tawlbort' or Tawlbwrdd, mentioned in the Laws of Hywel Dda, was likened to hnefatafl in a 1941 article and thought to be derived from Old Norse (tafl-bord)

Laws originally formulated by Hywel Dda contained references to hnefatafl under its Welsh name of tawlbwrdd. This document provides a valuation of the forces on the king's tawlbort. Enough information is given that calculations show a king and eight men against sixteen. The extant laws date from about 1250.

It's not actually known if they are the same game. The next reference, some five hundred years later, is roughly the right geographical area

The last historical instance of tafl was recorded by Linnaeus in 1732, while he was on a tour of Lapland. He left us a set of rules for a game called tablut, which depicted a Swedish king fighting off a horde of Muscovites, and also left drawings of the board and pieces. The rules are are lacking only a few particulars. It is from these rules that most of our knowledge of tafl comes, and when variants are reconstructed for which little evidence survives, rules are often borrowed from Linnaeus's account to fill in the gaps.

Hnefatafl is apparently mentioned in some of the mythical-heroic Icelandic sagas, Fornaldur Sogur in modern coinage, first published in Uppsala in the late 17th century.
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